Decked Out with Ivy (Red Maple Falls #13)

Chapter 13

Ivy wasn’t kidding when she said her family was competitive. But what she failed to mention was they were also a bunch of saboteurs. Cody lost count of how many M&M’s Trey ate out of his bowl. Or how Cynthia kept bumping into his station. Or how Ivy kept sucking frosting off her finger, completely distracting him and causing him to waste precious time.

Every time she stuck that finger in her mouth, he had to hold back a groan. There was no way she wasn’t doing it on purpose, and when she winked at him, he knew damn well she was. That little minx. He was going to make her pay later.

Trey disappeared from the kitchen and returned with a bag. He placed the brown paper bag on the floor and reached in, pulling out a box of ice cream cones.

Cody watched as curiosity got the better of him. Trey took a cone out and covered it in frosting before placing all green M&M’s on the cone to make it look like a tree.

“Hey!” Cody said. “Is that why you kept taking my M&M’s?”

“I was running low. Had to improvise.”

“Maybe if you stopped eating them,” Cynthia spat as she focused in on unwrapping an entire bag of tootsie rolls she was using as logs for her log cabin.

Cody took a sip of the Five Leaf Brewery IPA and was grateful he found people he could trust. He didn’t expect these pictures to be in the tabloids the next morning. And with the way Trey, Rome, and Cynthia handled that asshole paparazzo, he felt like he could put his guard down and just be. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so relaxed, despite the competitive tension.

Cynthia bumped into Rome’s station as she reached for the sprinkles.

“Watch it!” Rome exclaimed. “There is a master at work here.”

“I can see why you sell houses and don’t make them,” Cynthia quipped.

“I can see why you choose to argue with people for a living,” he rebutted, and Cody tipped his beer to his lips to hide his smile.

“He did that on purpose, just FYI,” Poppy said. Poppy might have been out of town, but she had said there was no way she’d miss the competition, so she was in her hotel, going to town on her own gingerbread house.

“I’d believe her. She has the best view,” Ivy said, and Cody couldn’t stop the laugh.

If anyone had told him a month ago, he’d be decorating gingerbread houses and having fun. He would have told them they were out of their fucking mind. But he was having fun. He never got this experience growing up. Christmas was just another day on the calendar. “ A waste of money and nothing but aggravation !” his mother used to say.

They didn’t have much, so maybe she was trying to not get his hopes up. But what he was learning from Ivy, her family, and this entire town was that Christmas was as expensive as you wanted it to be. Singing along to Christmas songs on the radio, walking around to see the decorations in the windows of stores and on the houses… None of that cost a dime. The only cost was time.

It was painstakingly obvious his mother couldn’t even afford him that. He’d been nothing more than an inconvenience from the moment he was born.

He wondered how differently his life would have been if his mother put in just a little effort when it came to Christmas. They could have bundled up and took a walk around the neighborhood. They could have driven downtown to see the city tree or put the radio on and sang like no one was listening. Anger rose inside of him, but it dissipated as he caught Ivy’s eyes. She dipped her finger in her mouth again, and his lip quirked as he shook his head.

“You play dirty,” he mouthed.

Her eyes widened, making her look almost cartoon-like. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sex,” Rome said. “You’ve been making sexual gestures at him all night.”

“I have not!”

“Mmmhmm.” Aunt Claire nodded. “Suck that finger any harder, and you’ll pull the skin right off.”

Ivy gasped, and he bit away a laugh.

“You’re more than welcome to forfeit and go back to your place,” Cynthia said.

“Cynthia has a point,” Poppy chimed in from the screen.

“Nice try,” Ivy said. “But you’re not getting rid of the competition that easily.”

“I think I could win this thing,” Cody said, placing a gumdrop along his roof. Everyone in the kitchen burst out laughing, and Cody glanced up, looking around. “What?”

“Son, you might be a fine actor, but you suck at this,” Ivy’s father said, and Ivy pulled her lips into her mouth.

He looked at the globs of frosting dripping from the roof and clumped in the corners. His eyes scanned over the shaky lines across the rooftop and the oddly placed gumdrops. It was a fucking disaster, but it was the first gingerbread house he’d ever decorated.

He was damn proud of it.

“It does kind of suck, but not bad for a first timer.” He stood back, admiring his shoddy work.

“I think it’s adorable.” Ivy stepped out from her station and walked over to his. He liked being near her, liked how she bit her lip as she studied his disaster.

“If you place gumdrops along where the two pieces of the roof meet, it’ll really bring it together.”

He tilted his head. “Are you just trying to be nice?”

“No. For a first timer, it’s really good. You should have seen our first gingerbread houses.”

“Mine collapsed,” Poppy said. “All four walls caved right in. Total failure.”

“At least you got your walls up at some point,” Cynthia said. “I couldn’t get the damn thing to hold to save my life.”

“Mine was perfect,” Rome said, and the entire kitchen laughed harder than before.

“Bullshit,” Trey said. “Yours collapsed, and you swore it was supposed to look like that.”

“It was. It got taken out by the Christmas tornado.”

Cody glanced at Ivy, who rolled her eyes. He loved how they were making him feel better when they didn’t have to. It was something he never had.

It made him never want to go back to the land of fake-believe. But this wasn’t real either, was it? He and Ivy were pretending to be together to help save his career. This was just a bonus. He wanted more than that with her, though. He wanted the real thing.

He wanted to wake up every morning with Ivy in his bed. Have her be the last person he spoke to at night. He wanted to curl up on the couch with her and watch a movie while she knitted another sweater. He wanted her to make him as many sweaters as her heart desired. He wanted to make her happy, because she made him happy.

He’d been floating through life, doing whatever his agent or PR team told him to, but nothing made him happy. Nothing made him feel alive. The last week with Ivy, he had felt more alive than he had in his entire life.

She pressed up on her toes, kissed his cheek. “You’re doing great.” Three words that, to anyone else, wouldn’t mean much, but to him, it meant more than it probably should.

“Thanks,” he said, placing a gumdrop along the seam as Ivy suggested.

“Who votes on the winner, anyway?” he asked.

“Mom posts it to her social media accounts. She’s friends with the entire town. They know it’s coming and are probably waiting for the pictures. Once Mom uploads them, we’ll leave voting open for twenty-four hours. Then Mom will let us know who the winner is.”

“Are there any prizes?” he asked, just trying to figure out how they did things, and with how seriously they took it, the prize must’ve been good.

“Bragging rights for the year,” Deb said. “And trust me that goes a long way in this family.”

Here he thought they were vying for some material item when all they wanted was to win so they could rub in their family’s face. Once again, something no one could put a price tag on. No wonder Ivy had made fun of him that first day for his three-hundred-dollar jeans request.

Ivy hummed Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer , and the familiar song reached somewhere deep inside him. He wanted Ivy to know she meant more to him than some pictures in a tabloid. She had been going out of her way to make him fall in love with Christmas, dragging him along to participate in all her sacred traditions. It was time he shared one of his own with her.

He’d been wondering if he should get her something for Christmas, but after tonight, he knew she wouldn’t want something anyone could buy her. She’d want something personal. Special.

He excused himself to the bathroom, slipped out his phone and shot off a text.